News & Notes

Open access is all about making it easier for people to share information – especially scholarly information. By making your articles, presentations, working papers, data, and other research products openly available, your impact reach increases! The easier it is to access your work, the easier it is to cite your work.

Miami’s Scholarly Commons is free to the Miami University community, and its new enhancements make it simple to use. By uploading your work to the Scholarly Commons, your scholarship will be gathered in one location that will be preserved.

Enhancements to the Scholarly Commons include:

A new faculty profile option: Create your own scholar’s profile with picture, bio, C.V., links to social media accounts, research interests, etc. Your profile seamlessly integrates with your collection of full text articles in the Scholarly Commons. You’ll get a permanent URL that connects directly to your scholar’s profile.

Metrics: As people view and download your works, they are counted. You can now see how many times your work has been downloaded and which countries have your fans.

It’s simple and easy to get started, and these short videos show the process step by step:

This week, our playlist explores and celebrates "modern classical" music; here we mean compositions that pushed the art of music forward during the past 100 years. Our list begins with Sibelius' Symphony No. 7 (1924), which is Romantic in style. However, its innovative form (a one-movement symphony) is indicative of the modern urge to challenge tradition and expectations. The pieces that follow are by no means easy listening, but they are certainly powerful. Several of them are in remembrance of historical tragedies.

For this week's playlist we asked our staff and student employees to recommend music they love, with an emphasis on the odd and interesting. We compiled the available tracks into a Spotify playlist, and we'll say with all due modesty that it's spectacular.

It is, however, exclusively for the musically adventurous. We have live funk, folktronica, art rock, post-grunge, funeral doom metal, turbo-folk, and bluegrass ... and that's just the first 7 tracks. There's more, including modern opera, Irish folk, jazz, indie folk, whatever one would call what The Shaggs are doing, and the best 1 1/3 second song you'll ever hear.

Midpoint Musical Festival is an annual event in Cincinnati, dedicated to celebrating the best of contemporary music. This year's festival is happening this weekend (September 25, 26, and 27). 120 bands will play on 10 different stages; most shows are in the Over-the-Rhine region, with headliners performing in Washington Park. 2015 performers include Purity Ring, Ride, Iron & Wine, Sylvan Esso, and Tune-Yards. JR JR (formerly Dale Earnhardt Jr Jr) play a free album release show at 5 PM on Friday. You can learn more (and buy tickets) here: http://mpmf.com/.

Here's a playlist highlighting some of the best past and present Ohio musicians (or least acts with significant Ohio roots). The list ranges from classics like Cincinnati's Isley Brothers and Akron's Devo to more recent stars like The Black Keys (also from Akron) and Cincinnati's Walk the Moon. Two of the featured bands hailed from Oxford (The Lemon Pipers [60s] and 12 Rods [90s]).

With the new school year beginning, we are excited to roll out our Fall 2015 exhibit: The Creative Codex: Books as Art in the Walter Havighurst Special Collections! Curated by Preservation Librarian Ashley Jones and Curator of Special Collections Carly Sentieri, it is a visually enthralling exhibit focusing on the physical book itself as a work of art. However, displaying these materials which focus not on printed content but on the objects themselves raises a unique challenge in how to display artist's books behind glass. To address this challenge, Ashley and I decided to create a three-dimensional image of one of books which could be used as part of the exhibit. The item we chose was Islam Aly's Crucial Perimeter 1, Ashley's favorite book in the exhibit. After a bit of research, we went with Autodesk's 123D Catch as a free option for rendering a 3D object out of a series of photographs.

Ashley Jones preparing the book to be suspended with fishing wire for the photo shoot

The first question was how to capture the book at every angle. Given that its spine is designed to bend like a Slinky, we had to make sure it was at the same curve for every shot at every angle. We settled on suspending it from the ceiling to be able to photograph it at every angle without having to adjust it. After creating secure bindings to ensure no excessive strain was being placed on the book, we used fishing line to hang the book.

The book hanging from the ceiling in Preservation, ready to be photographed

Once suspended, I was able to photograph the book at every angle. In the end, it took 70 photos to create the 3D rendering. Overall, 123D Catch does a pretty impressive job of automatically stitching the individual photos together into a 3D model, but sometimes it needed help. Given the symmetry of the book, sometimes it struggled to understand which side was which. Also, while I thought to scatter some materials on the floor below the book to help identify the angles of the photos, I didn't plan for how to manage the repetitive ceiling patterns, which resulted in the photos from below the book being the most problematic in stitching together.

Manual stiching in 123D Catch

But when all was said and done, we were able to create a nice little 3D digital version of the artist's book. 123D Catch was able to then turn this into a YouTube video which we now have running on a screen as part of the exhibit and which you watch in King 321 or on YouTube The edges are a little rough, which I would have liked to be able to clean up more but Autodesk's 3D object editor Meshmixer was unable to process the object and in the end we had to accept the version 123D Catch rendered. But we're still pretty happy with the job it does showing the viewer how Aly created such a fascinating object. The Creative Codex is on display in King 321 until December 11, 2015. A reception will be held Thursday, October 22, from 4-6 PM in King 320. A tour of the exhibit will be included, as well as a guest lecture by Diane Stemper, a local artist whose works are featured in the exhibit.

If you're looking for some of the most interesting and inspiring new artists in pop, rock, and hip hop, look no further than this playlist from Amos Music Library. The tracks are by artists whose debut album was released between 2010 and today. The tracks are in alphabetical order and range from the probably-familiar (CHVRCHES, Tame Impala) to the wonderfully obscure (Shabazz Palaces, Oryx & Crake). Take a listen:

In celebration of the beginning of the great times and great achievements of the 2015-16 school year, enjoy this Spotify playlist featuring the first tracks from over 40 noteworthy rock, pop, and hip hop albums:

The Stats Help Desk located in B.E.S.T. Library (Laws Hall) returns this semester with new hours. This is a free service available to any Miami student seeking assistance understanding statistical theorems or using statistical software for your coursework, including:

JMP

Matlab

Microsoft Excel

Minitab

R

SAS

SPSS

​STATA

StatCrunch

This is a first come, first served service; we do not take appointments. Drop by and visit the Stats Help Desk located behind the stained glass wall near the printers during any of the times below to take advantage of this service.